One of the infamous images documented by soldiers at Abu Ghraib
shows a hooded man standing on a box. The detainee’s hands
were attached to wires. He was told that he if he stepped off the box
he would be electrocuted.
Photo by Nubar Alexanian
June 6, 2009
According to a June 3 Associated Press-GfK survey, 52 percent of Americans say torture is justified in some cases to thwart terrorists attacks. More than two-thirds of Republicans say torture can be justified compared with just over a third of Democrats.
The poll comes on the heels of former Vice President Cheney’s unctuous justifications that “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a euphemism for torture), sanctioned by the Bush administration, are not torture. Cheney dismissed criticism as “contrived indignation and phony moralizing.”
The poll seems to indicate that, unfortunately, too many Americans are believing this big lie.
Those who sanction torture or justify torture either don’t know the law, or advocate flaunting the law, or have lost their moral bearings. Human torture is not only morally unacceptable – it is also a crime. Waterboarding, for example, is explicitly prohibited by the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. Using torture places us in the same company as history’s infamous torturers. Waterboarding, for example, dates back to the Dark Ages. By using torture, we have lost any ideological advantage we might have had — the promotion of democracy, freedom and human rights. We became the thugs our enemies say we are.
How could a country with a Judaic-Christian heritage even consider torture justifiable? But then, I remember that many torture methods were invented during Roman Catholic Church inquisitions beginning in the 1300s, that torture was used during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693, and the public lynchings of blacks during the 19th and 20th centuries often included burning and torture.
And who can forget the U.S Army School of Americas (SOA)/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, based in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American security personnel in combat, counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics. The SOA training manuals advocate torture, extortion, and execution.
Is it any wonder that SOA graduates are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America? Have we regressed as a society to where torture is yet again acceptable or never was unacceptable? Apparently so.
The Hunger Site